Review by Choice Review
Art historian and critic Dave Hickey considers the essays in this book to be his best writing on women artists. He chose to revise and compile essays he had previously written with no particular curatorial choice but gender. Yet, Hickey brings up gender only when "warranted by the work itself" (according the publisher's website). Hickey's style is animated and occasionally brash. The essays are of varying lengths, and each is illustrated with a full-page color image of the artist's work. Most of the artists work in the abstract, and media Hickey treats include painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. Among the notable women included are Lynda Benglis, Bridget Riley, Joan Mitchell, and Elizabeth Murray. Hickey takes a casual stance with some of the artists he knows personally and critically reviews specific art works for the others. He often harks back to the 1970s, the heyday of the art world in New York City. Inclusion of the original publication dates of the essays would have helped put them into historical context. This is less a book of criticism than an engaging treatment of some of the most fascinating contemporary artists. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Anna Calluori Holcombe, University of Florida
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
"MOST OF MY favorite people are women," Dave Hickey proclaims in the introduction to "25 Women." This statement, and indeed the whole book, can be read as a response to the accusations of sexism that have followed Hickey since the culture wars of the '90s, when he published "The Invisible Dragon," a series of cantankerous essays attacking the academic art establishment. According to Hickey, beauty, once the handmaiden of art, had been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness by a censorious ring of tenured apparatchiks. Hickey's antagonists fought back. For the feminist critic Amelia Jones, his "revival of an abstract notion of 'beauty'" served to validate "a particular group of critics (almost all white men) as having access to the truth." For its critics, beauty was hardly innocent or self-evident, but hampered with cultural baggage: the objectification of women, the exclusion of minorities and the meretricious seductions of the marketplace. The beauty debates have since cooled, but Hickey has stoked his reputation as a swashbuckler against the prudes and pedants of the ivory tower. For some, he's a rebel outlaw. For others, he's an anti-intellectual huckster. Either way, he holds the distinction of being a public intellectual, one of a handful of art critics known and read by a wider audience. For a man who has made a career out of pen-lashing art-world bureaucrats, it's a bit surprising that Hickey wrote "25 Women" in memoriam to the New Museum founder Marcia Tucker, who died in 2006, a woman he calls "a politically correct museum curator." It's unclear whether Hickey is sincere, backhanded or somehow both when he writes: "My debt to Marcia is incalculable. She was brave, energetic and nonjudgmental to the point of having no taste at all. That was O.K. because I had enough taste for us both." The texts gathered in "25 Women" are previously published monographic essays commissioned for museum and gallery exhibitions. They're positive in tone and laced with folksy erudition, promiscuous associations and grand, Whitmanesque declarations. "Temperamentally, Alex is a woman of the West - a blonde in the dust," he writes of the collagist Alexis Smith - a typical Hickeyism that seems more at home on a Neil Young B-side than in the pages of Artforum. Hickey is a gorgeous writer when he wants to be. The Latvian-American photorealist Vija Celmins, he writes in one of the book's best, most ambitious essays, "patiently deflects the dark rush of history as it pours out of the deep, gray mouth of the photograph - of all photographs - and resists the vertiginous gravity of the past that simultaneously sucks us back in." Elsewhere, Hickey's prose can be gouty and pompous. He has an annoying habit of weaving fussy patrimonial garlands linking his subjects to mostly dead, mostly male masters. In one breathless sentence, he likens the painter Sharon Ellis to Caravaggio, Jackson Pollock, Caspar David Friedrich, Martin Johnson Heade, Philipp Otto Runge, Bridget Riley and Georges Seurat. Occasionally, the casual sexism that pokes through Hickey's prose makes him look less like the art world's enfant terrible than its dirty old uncle. Epithets like "haughty Southern bitch" and "surfer slut," applied to the renowned postminimalist sculptor Lynda Benglis and the abstract painter Mary Heilmann, respectively, stand out as lame misfires in otherwise rigorous, thoughtful essays. (Compliments to whoever had the good sense to nix the book's working title, "Hot Chicks.") The author claims there is "no agenda" behind "25 Women." But Hickey's mulligan stew of autobiographical memoir and intellectual jazz is an attempt to reappropriate feminism from "academic feminists" who value art as a weapon of consciousness-raising and social critique. Identity politics are conspicuously absent from the book. In their place, he introduces his own menagerie of sacred cows and privileged terms: sophistication, worldliness, cosmopolitanism and abstraction. Hickey is neither art criticism's reactionary philosopher king nor its populist Robin Hood, but a sensualist with an acquired taste for art that is resistant to interpretation and unapologetically elitist, a term he halfheartedly redeems as a positive value. He's a colorful essayist and a perceptive critic. His popularity points to a real problem: Many people feel alienated by contemporary art and the obscure, pleasureless language that encrusts it. Those who don't cringe at the mention of identity politics, who maintain hope for art as a space for beauty and justice, pleasure and politics, would do well to borrow Hickey's tools to dismantle his house. For some, Hickey is a rebel outlaw. For others, he's an anti-intellectual huckster. CHLOE WYMA is an editor at The Brooklyn Rail. Her work has appeared in publications including New York magazine and Dissent.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 13, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Hickey has sizzle. A MacArthur fellow and a former executive editor of Art in America and academic, he rattles cages and yanks chains as an art writer of voracious attentiveness, free-spirited intelligence, invigorating wit, vinegary candor, and a gift for literary constructions of provoking finesse. He was inspired to revisit and revamp his essays about 25 women artists and their work as a tribute to his friend, the late curator and New Museum founder Marcia Tucker. Hickey balances incisive, funny, idiosyncratic biographical observations with all-senses-firing immersions in the art under discussion, racing off on tangents and nailing down arresting perceptions about what we expect from art and what we receive. He revels in the turbulent depths of painters as varied as Joan Mitchell, Vija Celmins, Bridget Riley, Elizabeth Murray, and Hung Liu. Hickey offers a rebel-cry appreciation for Lynda Benglis and an intricate response to Alexis Smith's collages and guides us through the intellectual puzzles posed by Sarah Charlesworth's photographs, Ann Williams' installations, and Teresita Fernandez's sculptures. The artists are significant and intriguing, Hickey's criticism exceptionally dynamic and enlightening.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Throughout these trenchant essays on female artists, Hickey (Air Guitar) is characteristically incisive, challenging, and weird; he's just as likely to cite a Rolling Stones concert or Lou Reed lyric as the theory of Gilles Deleuze or Jacques Derrida. Hickey turns his incisive lens to the careers of various female visual and performing artists in this bustling essay collection. The range of names represented here is considerable (including some the reader may never have heard of, such as painters Sharon Ellis and Michelle Fierro), and regardless of reputation, Hickey always deploys the same lively rigor. He describes the late Elizabeth Murray as "the absolute mistress of high physical comedy... like Keith Haring with a domestic life and a Ph.D." On Bridget Riley, he explains how her "fatally misconstrued" works of op art (using optical illusions) "compromise our current penchant for reading art rather than experiencing it." There are other taut, complex essays on Vija Celmins, Roni Horn, Anne Hamilton, and Joan Mitchell ("In the last ten years, nothing has gotten better but mobile phones and Joan Mitchell's paintings"). The introduction, titled "A Ladies' Man", in which Hickey explains how "most of my favorite people are women," emerges as a surprisingly powerful piece of memoir. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Idiosyncratic assessments of contemporary women painters, sculptors, and installation and performance artists by an enfant terrible of art criticism. Hickey (Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste, 2013, etc.), now 74, has been a thorn in the side of art criticism for years. In "A Ladies' Man," the introduction to this admirable collection, he admits loving women, his most favorite people. The essays have no agenda or art politics and little feminism: "There is a lot of euphony, death, vogue, fanciful narrative, and fugitive nuance." The author often talks about the art by talking about something else, "lest writing shatter the art like a fragile leaf in clumsy hands." All of the artists are alive and working except Sarah Charlesworth and Joan Mitchell, one of Hickey's favorites. Her abstracts, like "classical epigramsintertwine the light and dark, the petulance and grandeur." Rowdy and fearless, she "got into the same car everyone else did," but she "drove it in the opposite direction, back toward the hard, Godless specifics of living." Hickey's writing is clever, straightforward, and honest. Literary quotes abound. He draws on Gilles Deleuze's concept of "plasticity" to describe the "bounded experimentation" of Bridget Riley's paintings, which destabilize the "entire zone between the beholder and the work." Readers will no doubt discover artists they aren't familiar with, such as Fiona Banner and her 2010 installation piece Harrier, in which the British plane hangs from the ceiling like a captured bird. Lynda Benglis' vertical wax landscapes seemingly ooze out of a wall, and Michelle Fierro's set pieces, "mandarin grunge," create "Zen gardens out of painting's refuse." Vanessa Beecroft's performance pieces, like vb45, deploy the "rhetoric of painting in the space of sculpture," positioning women, often nude, in various poses for hours at a time. Hickey has piquant, insightful things to say about all of these artists. Some readers will find cause for disagreement, but these fun-to-read essays delight, intrigue, and, most of all, educate. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
